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Summary

Offer to email the MBR and partition table to an address supplied by the user at the end of install. Also make it easy to do this at any time later on (partitioning tools should offer to do it before and after writing a partition table). On the boot CDs and generic recoery CDs, provide a tool to reinstall the MBR and partition table from this emai or a copy of the attached file etc.

Rationale

Creating a recovery CD/floppy is awkward - I haven't done it for years and I don't know who does. If you're traveling with your laptop, there's a good chance you don't have it (because you put it somewhere safe!). I'm feeling the pain right now and the solution has become painfully obvious.

Use cases

Busted partition table/MBR, somehow get a generic recovery/boot CD, get into your email (or wherever you put the file - perhaps your email is on the busted disk) and fix things with ease.

Scope

Design

Need a simple tool to extract/install the useful information (MBR and partition table) to/from a file. Also need to adapt installer and other partitioning software to use this tool and email the output.

Implementation

Should be trivial (shell script around dd) but I'm kinda busy now trying to recover my busted computer.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Unresolved issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec